Cyber bullying is the real world writ large

The trolls on Twitter bring to the foreground attitudes that are entirely mainstream in our society, writes Jeff Sparrow.

The Twitter campaign against Charlotte Dawson was genuinely awful, an illustration of the real world consequences of internet arsehattery: as someone once said, 'though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.'

But what broader conclusions should we draw about online trolling?

I started thinking about internet bullying when researching pornography and censorship for my book Money Shot. I was spurred by a now defunct website called Is Anyone Up?: a so-called 'revenge porn' page that published sexts gone astray.

Its stock-in-trade were images submitted by ex-partners or vengeful lovers or aggrieved friends, usually of a young woman posing naked or half-naked in a bathroom, holding her iPhone up to a mirror. But most posts also featured a screen dump from Facebook showing a woman's name and location, followed by a sample of her public photos (innocuous snaps of her with her friends or her pet), alongside images of her naked and frozen in the unflattering glare of a smartphone flash.

A streak of extraordinary cruelty ran through the project: the mocking captions; the deliberate juxtapositions of holiday photos next to the nudes; comment threads in which digital rubberneckers highlighted flaws or peculiarities in the person's body, and added whatever personal knowledge they possessed about her. Vicious, yes, but remarkably popular: with 30 million page views a month until it closed in mid-2012.

As with the Dawson case, it's tempting for commentators to respond with generational tut-tutting. In relationship to the internet and its users, pundits break all too easily into the curmudgeonly chorus from 'Bye Bye Birdie': 'Why can't they be like we were/Perfect in every way?/What's the matter with kids today?'

Yet there's a sense in which, on the contrary, such sites reflect just how well the values proselytised by an older generation have been accepted.

For the past 30 years, politicians and ideologues have argued for the application of free market reforms not merely in the economy but as the governing principle ruling every aspect of human behaviour. Think, for instance, about debates over climate change, where it's increasingly taken for granted that, if we want to fight global warning, we must 'put a price on carbon'. The market logic of neoliberalism has been so normalised that we barely consider what turning the environment into a commodity to be bought and sold actually means.

In a market society, every citizen becomes, whether they wanted to or not, an entrepreneur - independent of and in competition with everyone else. Everyone is a potential rival, willing to screw you over if only you let them. The rational response is to take them down first; and if you aren't able to do that, then what you get is exactly what you deserve.

Political theorist Wendy Brown argues:

In making the individual fully responsible for her- or himself, neoliberalism equates moral responsibility with rational action; it erases the discrepancy between economic and moral behaviour by configuring morality entirely as a matter of rational deliberation about costs, benefits, and consequences. But in so doing, it carries responsibility for the self to new heights: the rationally calculating individual bears full responsibility for the consequences of his or her action no matter how severe the constraints on this action …

That's the context for the distinctive pitilessness of online interactions, the unwillingness to empathise with those being humiliated or trolled. By the neoliberal logic, if they make a bad choice, well, by definition they are in the wrong.

Gina Rinehart expressed it perfectly.

"If you're jealous of those with more money," explained Australia's richest women, "don't just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself - spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working."

If you're broke, suck it up. It's your fault and no-one else's.

In the industrialised world, vast inequality has been utterly normalised. According to the most recent statistics, the wealthiest 20 per cent of Americans now received nearly half of all the income that the country generated, while the top 0.01 per cent received 6 per cent of the total. The richest 10 per cent controlled between 80 and 90 per cent of stocks, bonds, trust funds, and business equity, and over 75 per cent of non-home real estate. As one analyst put it, that meant they basically owned the United States. Yet as Suzanne Moore recent explained in The Guardian:

"The psychic coup of neoliberal thinking is just this: instead of being disgusted by poverty, we are disgusted by poor people themselves."

In that context, why would anyone expect online egalitarianism? Or, to put it another way: if we loathed the poor, why wouldn't we despise those who end up the targets of digital lynch mobs?

Twitter and Facebook and the other social media platforms take for granted a neoliberal willingness to represent our relationships as double-entry social accounting (friends on one side, followers on the other). It wasn't a coincidence that Facebook sprang from Mark Zuckerberg's attempts to rate the desirability of female undergraduates at Harvard. When markets become total, our most intimate relations can be tabulated and scored, just like anything else.

Which helps explain one of the most striking aspects of Is Anyone Up? - while many of its photos were sent vengefully, a substantial proportion were self-submitted, sent in by the women themselves. The site's proprietor often posted screenshots of the messages he received: teenagers texting or tweeting him, pleading with him to publish their photos.

Why would one voluntarily display themselves before such a merciless crew? For many people, the sense of competition, even - or perhaps especially - in the private sphere, have been entirely internalised, so much so that the hierarchical sexual rating of Is Anyone Up? seems entirely appropriate.

That's why it's so wrong to see bullies as an internet problem. The trolls on Twitter aren't anomalous so much as exemplary. They bring to the foreground attitudes that are entirely mainstream in a society in which the most popular reality television generates entertainment out of the weak and the desperate being belittled and humiliated by the strong and the well-paid.

Indeed, it's tempting to conclude that those tabloid moralists declaring war on social media over the Dawson episode are less concerned about bullying than about its democratisation. In the past, of course, you needed a radio show or a newspaper column to ruin someone's life - but these days anyone can do it.

Yes, what happened to Charlotte Dawson was awful, and depressingly common.

But it's too easy to point the finger at the internet. The virtual world reflects the society outside our computers - and that's where the real problem lies.

Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland literary journal and the author of Money Shot: A Journey into Porn and Censorship. View his full profile here.

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